What else could we be doing for our customers?
That’s a question I get asked a lot. When people reach out to me, it’s often because they want to offer something more to the people they help – they just aren’t exactly sure what that would entail.
And that’s what makes it the perfect situation to do a survey. Surveys seem deceptively simple but there is a good amount of complexity built into those lists of questions.
First and foremost, you have to get super precise about who you want to survey.
Are you looking to find out what your customers want, or are you hoping to figure out what might convert new visitors to your website?
Do you want to hear from the people who use your platform or from the people who make the decision to buy it?
Are you looking for long-term customers or do you want to hear from people fresh out of implementation?
Next, you need to figure out what you want to discover.
For instance, do you want to know if your customer service is doing a good job? Or if your support team is responding quickly? Maybe you want to find out how helpful your product is or whether a new feature is a customer favorite.
It’s likely you will want to get information on a few aspects of your business, which means you have to think about how long your survey can reasonably be. The longer it is, the more information you can get – but it gets less likely that people will finish it.
A good survey means finding that sweet spot between so short it’s uninformative and so long that it’s too daunting.
If your survey will be conducted by phone and you have a super personable team calling people, you may be able to coax them into a longer survey. But if your survey is a pop-up on your website, it’s unlikely people will stick around if it takes too long.
From there, you need to think of how often you want to conduct your survey. Will it be a one-off to gather information from a specific moment in time? Or will you repeat it regularly so you can start tracking trends? And, if the latter, how often do you want to repeat it?
There are also issues of question order, targeted modules, platform technology, and data analysis. As with so much of marketing, surveys are one of those things that work best when set up correctly from the beginning. Ideally, as part of a comprehensive strategy.
Surveys are one of the things I do for my clients. If they are something you would like some help with, sign up for a free consult with me and we’ll talk. That’s what I’m here for!
Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash